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John Turturro

John Turturro and I at the opening of Passione in Beverly Hills. I’m the tall one. It’s a brilliant documentary about the Naples, Italy music scene…I was hoping to do an article on it for the LA Weekly, which would have gotten the thing the attention it warranted in this town. New editor wasn’t interested. A shame, it could have put the thing over in L.A., and gotten the soundtrack attention too. One of those rare times a music journalist can have an impact on another medium. And the film, and the Neapolitan music scene it so lovingly portrayed, deserved a helluva lot better than they got from the local press.

There was a great party at the Italian Consulate afterward. Pretty heady haps for a jazz journo, I gotta say. This was on a Saturday night. I quit the Weekly that Tuesday. Told the editor I quit. He sent me a lecture on punctuation. I told him to fuck off.

But I did take the kernel of that unwritten article and made it the coda of my very last Brick’s Picks:

Just saw John Turturro’s Passione, and talk about a revelation. We barely knew anything about Neapolitan music…Dean Martin, Lou Canova, pizza parlor juke boxes … that was about it. Who knew that back in ancient, messed-up, photogenic Naples could be found the real thing. Not even the hippest radio stations played the stuff. That bothered Turturro. He loves this music. So he did one of those things that must drive Hollywood agents utterly mad: He took a film crew over there and shot 23 songs by 23 different acts in 23 different locations in 21 days and, man, you gotta see the results. There isn’t a performance that isn’t stellar, and the passion and intensity is so stirring you’d have to be a hardened cynic not to be moved. The tunes run the artistic gamut from street singers to classic love songs to art songs to operatic numbers to very Neapolitan rap, rock and even reggae. Turturro limits his screen time to a couple street interviews (and one freaky dance); mostly he just narrates, sparingly. He doesn’t edit the tunes all to hell and no storyline bogs the thing down. It’s just music and locations and people — no heavy analysis, no dreadful critics, and unlike Buena Vista Social Club, no American players sitting in and tainting everything. Nope. This is the best music flick we have seen since Calle 54, and to be honest, we liked this even more. Go see it. Buy the soundtrack. You’ll be making pasta and singing “O Sole Mio” to your dog, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Still bums me I didn’t get to write that piece. I remember telling my wife on the way home that this was gonna be the big time. It would have been, too. Only problem was I didn’t want the big time. I just wanted my life back.

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My latest writing at: Brick's Picks

If Kubrick had died a year or two earlier he never would have made Eyes Wide Shut and his legacy would have been untarnished by such a mediocre flick. Not to mention the dirty old man as director ickiness about the whole thing. And the dialogue, sheesh. Only Pollack sounds like he not acting, and […]

Listening to Steaming Coils lost masterpiece Breaded–the record, I don’t think it ever came out on CD–and digging Brad Laner’s drums. Way loose, loopy, groovy, just the right pops and splashes, splattery press rolls and punchy bass drum kicked loud under crashing cymbals. It’s all so gloriously unmechanical and organic, and the only other drummer […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

As the NRA has been so successful at getting NRA true believers elected in red states and red districts, arming teachers has been the position of probably most Republicans in Congress for years, certainly in the House anyway. And Lapierre’s crazed speech today at CPAC was aimed at the NRA membership, to get them fired […]

I gotta admit that being epileptic I would never have a gun in the house, just as a matter of course. Legally, though, I could buy a gun just like any non-epileptic. It’s not like getting a driver’s license. I was allowed to keep my license but had to go through a year long probationary […]

My latest writing at: Brick's History

(Written in 2016 and never posted.) Never heard of this before, a simulated violent Nazi takeover of Winnipeg, Canada on a wintry February day in 1942. If Day, they called it, and no one had to explain what the if meant. The Axis powers were winning the war in February of 1942–indeed, they had yet […]

There are, as far as I can tell, two ways of saying Los Angeles in L.A. anymore. The English pronunciation, with a soft G (that is, a J) and ending like an ess (and the stress on the first syllable of Angeles). Los ANjeless. And the Spanish pronunciation, with the aspirated G (sort of like […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Science

It seems that 70,000 years ago the global population of homo sapiens was reduced to less than 26,000. Apparently they teased out that bit of info through some genetic analysis. As humans were by then in Africa and across much of Eurasia, that means we were very sparse on the ground. All seven billion of […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Brain

Had the brilliant idea of taking the nighttime dose of my seizure drugs earlier and it’s totally messed up my sleep cycle. Apparently when you hit sixty your body rejects any change just out of spite. Get off my lawn, it’s yelling at me. Probably a Trump supporter, too. Anyway, going to bed again. I […]

A pair of very dear friends, unbeknownst to each other, both pressed on me the idea that these little Facebook and Twitter utterances of mine ought to be preserved. So, after lots of hesitation, I scoured my social media postings for things that qualify as pieces and transferred them to my blog and posterity. Dozens […]